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Colonel (ret.) John (TJ) Wyatt Interview

Colonel (ret.) John (TJ) Wyatt Interview

T. J. Wyatt
May 11, 2010
Interviewer: Katherine Gillen
Re: Luke Air Force Base
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director: Diane Nevill
Transcribed by: Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona
GILLEN: Okay, today is May 11, 2010. This is the beginning of an interview with Retired Colonel T. J. Wyatt. Colonel Wyatt, can you tell us when you first came to Luke Air Force Base, and what it was like then?
WYATT: Sure. We arrived here in August of ’88, after having left a wonderful assignment at the Pentagon. I was fortunate enough to be asked to come out here to be in the initial cadre that flew in the F-15E. There were twenty-eight original guys, and they added a couple more of us in the middle of the summer of ’88. My initial job was with a training development squadron called Quad 4, who used to be right down the street here from the library. In that organization we had people from the F-16A, the F-16C, the Block 40 F-16, which was brand new then, and the F-15 and F-15E. And our job was to accept the coursewear that was being written by a contractor—which, by the way, still happens, which was a great idea—hire a bunch of old guys that used to fly airplanes to do that—to accept that coursewear for the schoolhouse for all those airplanes. That function since then has now moved back into the training squadron, so the 56th TRS houses the same kind of guys that do that, that we did in the old days back then. Well, I did that for a while, and then my number came up and I got checked out in the airplane in early ’89, and later on moved into an assistant ops officer job in the 550 Squadron, in that year of ’89. At that time here at Luke we had six or seven—I’d have to count 'em up—F-16 squadrons, including a reserve unit, the 302nd. And we had two squadrons of F-15A’s, basically, which were the “light grays” as we called ’em, the air superiority jets. The 555th and the 426th, the Claws and the Nickel, were flying those airplanes. We started out with the “E” model in the 461st Squadron, and it was in the building up here where the spikes are now. And if you look at the building number, the building number is 461—it just worked out that way. That building was built with F-15E money. But we all started there, and we were receiving the airplanes from the factory, which was kind of neat, to go pick up a brand new jet. As we said, “it’s got clean ashtrays.” Of course it doesn’t have any ashtrays in it, but…. We all got to go pick one up and bring it back. First time I’d ever been in an airplane that only had two hours on it. It was kind of neat. We sort of checked each other out as this initial instructor cadre. We had guys from everywhere, all walks of life, as we call it. We had a lot of F-4 guys, because the airplane was the grandson of the F-4 basically. All the things we couldn’t do in that old jet, we could do in the new one. Wise decisions were made by those in charge of then Tactical Air Command. Bob Russ was the commander then, a four-star. He more or less hand picked those guys. Out of thirty of us, I think we had twenty-six fighter weapons school graduates, which is enough to cause a riot, when you get that many geniuses in one room—from different airplanes even. We had 111 guys, which were experts at night terrain following, which we were gonna do in the “E” model; and fearless, I might add, after finding out how they did it in the old days. A lot of F-16 input, a lot of F-15 light gray, mostly a lot of F-4s, so we’re all mixed together here. And of that group, we started up the schoolhouse. And our job, according to Russ, was “spare no time in getting Seymour Johnson converted to the F-15E. Four squadrons at Seymour Johnson of F-4s at that time.
So away we went. We started, really, with what we called TX courses. Guys that were flying the F-4, transition them into the “E” model. These were experienced fighter guys. We didn’t do the first basic course for about six or eight months, because we wanted to get a cadre of those guys back over to Seymour. That was kind of neat. And about that time, we split into two squadrons, because we had each other checked out, and we had the airplanes then on the ramp. I think we had fourteen for each squadron. And so the 550th Squadron, which had been an F-15A squadron, along with the Jesters of the 461st, all four of those were light gray squadrons out here at one time. But at the time we got here, there were only two left, the nickel and five-oh. So some of us left the Jesters then and went down to the 550th Squadron, after that building stood up, and we started pumpin’ these guys through. And we got the “B” courses started. And that went on at a whirlwind pace. We got Seymour Johnson stood up just about a month before Desert Storm. And the first squadron that we had stood up initially, left there and deployed, boom, gone, and away we go with the first Gulf War. Well, things got a little hectic then. Some guys wanted to go. Most everybody here was volunteering to go over there, and all but about six or eight of us got turned down for one reason or another, because we had to keep the schoolhouse open. We had to stand up Mountain Home and … at that time it was supposed to be Clark Air Base, until the mountain blew up, and they ended up goin’ to Alaska. So we had a big charge to keep the airplane from … not slowing the pipeline down. So we couldn’t let everybody go. I think at one time we had eight or nine guys over there, and all of them flew in that first Gulf War, they were all veterans of that. Got them back about ’91, I think it was. The decision was made by some people who weren’t too smart, in my opinion, but nobody asked me. I had worked for one of 'em at the Pentagon, whom shall remain nameless because I consider him incompetent, and he only graduated as a four-star. But anyway, they made the decision to remove the F-15A airplane from here, and move it to Tyndall, Florida. Didn’t make any sense to anybody that’s ever flown out of Tyndall or Egland [phonetic] to do that. Egland is an operational unit, plus thousands of test airplanes that are down there. Not enough air space. When I was flying F-4s at Moody, we would try to go from Moody Air Force Base to Valasta [phonetic, Valdosta?], Georgia, and down the Gulf Coast to the Florida ranges where we could drop laser-guided weapons. And many, many, many times we’d be on the way down there with a four-ship, and we’d be about ten minutes out, and they’d call us and cancel our air space because some test guy had to do somethin’.
So knowing that, I said, “Where are they gonna put all these….” These guys have gotta have lots of high-speed ranges to do supersonic intercepts and stuff like that, which is perfect out here on the Goldwater Range complex, and had been forever. But like I said, nobody asked me, and away they went. So those two squadrons, the Claws, the 426th and the then Triple Nickel [555th], were in the building that now houses the flight surgeon’s office, up here by the big curve. The 309th, I think, was in the other side of that building, and they just moved over on the south end of the base, and that’s where both those light gray squadrons were. Their jets were parked up there where the Singapore F 16s are now. So boom, they’re gone, and there’s two squadrons of us left. At the time, General Browning was the air division commander. We had two wings here. We had the 405th Wing, which was the F-15 wing, and the 58th Wing, which was the F-16 wing. And the two of them together made the 832nd Air Division, of which he was the boss, a brigadier, and a super guy—really super guy. He decided, having been a former Triple Nickel commander, that that flag wasn’t leavin’ here. So he stood down the Five-Oh, and moved the Nickel flag to the 550th Squadron where we were. At the time, I had gone back and became the commander of the Quad Four Squadron. No, that hadn’t happened yet: I was the ops O. in the Five-Oh, and got a chance to be the commander after I’d been the ops officer in the Five-Oh, to the commander. Went back to the Quad Four and ran that place for about a year, and then lo and behold, during that period, the Nickel flag moved from the old light grays to the Five-Oh Squadron. We rolled up the 550th Squadron, and now we had the 461st and 555th flyin’ the “E” Model. Time came for a change in command in the Nickel, and lo and behold, I was thrown into the mix and got the job, which was the best job I ever had in my life—ever—was running that organization. I had some tremendous talented guys in that squadron—unbelievable. We took a team up, we got drawn to compete in a thing called Long Shot up at Nellis, where we took on the entire tactical air forces and won it, the whole thing. It was awesome. Those guys are all scattered out and flyin’ for Southwest and who knows where now. But it was a great time.
We kept on crankin’ out guys to stand up Mountain Home, and Elmandorf [phonetic] in the “E” Model during al that time. A lot of “B” course at that time, because we didn’t have as many transition guys as we’d been doin’, because we started with them. So another wise decision was made, much to our chagrin, in the ’93 or ’94 time frame, to send the “E” Models out of here to Seymour Johnson, and move the schoolhouse over there, and take one of those squadrons that was an operational squadron, and turn it into a schoolhouse squadron, which meant a smaller schoolhouse. I think we usually had fourteen jets, and they had twenty in that one squadron, so it was a little bit bigger, but not as big as the two squadrons that were out here.
GILLEN: Was that after we had changed from ACC to AETC?
WYATT: That happened in ’94.
GILLEN: That’s after.
WYATT: Yeah. When we took the last three “E” Models out of here to Seymour Johnson, in the spring of ’94, and we had become ACC then, and at that time had become the 56th Wing.
GILLEN: AETC, because that was, I think, ’93 we went from ACC to AETC.
WYATT: ’93 to AETC, and ’94 we became the 56th Wing, because somebody wanted to match up all the squadron numbers that were down at MacDill [phonetic] when MacDill went away. So we had some of 'em out here. So they decided to move them out here and move the flag out here. And so the air division went away, the 405th Wing went away, and now there’s one wing.
GILLEN: The 56th Fighter Wing.
WYATT: 56th Fighter Wing. We were part of that for a small time, until ’95. March of ’95, we took the last three out of here. So when I got here, we had two airplanes, and I was in the last three-ship that left—as a matter of fact, the lead airplane, me and Tex Mascot [phonetic]. Carried 'em over there, and the F-15 era at Luke ended, from all those years that the light grays had been here, and the initial stand-up. And the shame of a lot of this is, after I retired and worked for Lockheed Martin, teaching simulators and academics over there, a lot of the young kids that come along now, the F-16 guys, don’t even know that ever happened. They didn’t know the Nickel was ever an F-15E squadron, they didn’t know they were here for that long—which is kind of a shame to some of us, but those of us who know, it doesn’t matter.
Then we started to lose some F-16 stuff here late. Of course the [Breck?] moved a lot of air frames. They were flying some older jets here, but hopefully things are stable now. Just took down the 63rd Squadron not too long ago.
GILLEN: We’re kind of jumpin’ ahead a little bit.
WYATT: Yeah. But we’re talkin’ about airplanes. Anyway, along about then in ’92, I was lucky enough to get promoted out of a job. About two weeks after the colonels list came out, then ops group commander says, “You can come on over here, we’re gonna have your change of command in two weeks.” And I became what they called a silver leaf lounge guy, which carried the radio for the ops group commander when he didn’t want to. And that still goes on today, by the way. Spent a lot of nights out here, with a brick in my hand, but that was okay. So I just did that for a while, and then one day I was at the club, talking to Sam Young at lunch, who was a support group commander at that time, and he asked me a few things that didn’t make much sense at the time, and then about a week later, General Plummer [phonetic], who was a wing commander then, called me over and said, “Boy, have I got a job for you! You’ve had your fun….” We still had some jets here then, it was just right at the end of it, because he let me fly a couple times. He said, “You’re gonna be the deputy support group commander.” “What?!” “You heard me, you’ve had your fun.” I still think to this day that there was some behind-the-scenes thing that happened to make that happen. And two things make me think that: I got over there and stumbled around in the [brock?] house, trying to figure out what all these squadrons did, and who they were, and all this—big education for me, having been around airplanes all my life. But at the time, Sam started handing me more and more stuff to look at. And about three months after I was over there, he comes in one day and politely announces that he’s retiring. And I said, “What?!” “Yes, thirty years, I’m done.” Well, guess who got him a job? Tom Browning—got him a job at the Arizona Republic, which I said, “How long has that been in the works? So who’s gonna be the commander?” “You are, for the time being, until we figure out who it’s gonna be. Oh, by the way, you’re also gonna oversee the environmental impact study for the closing of Gila Bend as a military installation and contract it.” “What?!” Well, that fits, because I’m an airplane guy; and that operation down there was a squadron underneath a support group until the study proved that it would be cheaper to contract it and do away with it, which I still don’t think was right either, but once again, nobody asked me. So I had to go around, holding all these sessions all over Arizona, to begin the environmental impact statement work because the lease on the range was coming up. Because of the place goin’ contract and the lease comin’ up on the property itself, there was a lot of work to do to get that done. We had sessions at Tucson, and then the Indian nations, and at Ajo and Gila Bend, and just about everywhere—up here and all the places you’d think would be impacted by it. And as I got into that, I discovered that I thought we may have some problem with environmentalists, but for the most part, they were big on our side for the Air Force to gain complete control of that whole 3 million acres down there. The primary reason was they felt that the Bureau of Land Management, which currently had that job, didn’t have enough people to oversee it. And about that time was when we were goin’ through the antelope business, about how many of those things are left, and are they true Sonoran antelope, or what are they? So we had to get all that straightened out, and we jumped in there and helped 'em with that.
People wanted to preserve the Cabeza Prieta, which is a pristine piece of land right in the middle of the thing on the southern end, on the edge of the south tac range. Fortunately, we didn’t impact it, and to this day, of all of that acreage down there, only 3% of that land is impacted with weapons, and most of them are practice bombs. On every range of the tactical ranges, there’s three, the east, north, and south tac range. There’s one target that you can drop live weapons on. And that has to be cleaned up by government regulation periodically. All the rest of 'em are practice bombs, and they’re also in the clean-up, strict schedule.
GILLEN: I think we’re real lucky, actually. I’ll just put my little editorial comment, that the Air Force has maintained that big amount of desert. I was fortunate enough, I actually went down there—another endangered species is the bat, and I volunteered, actually, to spend the night down there and watch for bats going to their rookery. And I’ve never been in a place where you could see that many stars, and the temperature went from like 109 during the day, to probably like 69, because the desert was just [bare?].
WYATT: If you have never been down there, you’ve missed something.
GILLEN: Yes.
WYATT: I’ve been all over that range on the ground.
GILLEN: It’s an amazing place.
WYATT: I’ve been places where there’s a lot of petroglyphs. We found human habitat with the ceilings of it still blackened from the smoke from their fires. Found a couple of wells. The Thanksgiving Day Well is a fascinating place. We couldn’t find the bottom to it with those aluminum poles you use to clean swimming pools. You think it’s neat down there at night—I’ve been there at night many times—but stranger is to go down there in the middle of the afternoon, over there by the Thanksgiving Day Well, there’s total silence. You don’t hear anything. You can’t hear jets flying, you can’t hear anything. It’s kind of spooky in the daytime for it to be that quiet. And in the night, like you say, the sky is awesome.
So we got all that done, again, because the Air Force was willing to tell these folks, “Hey, we’re gonna oversee it, we’re gonna look after it.” During that process, the engineering squadron here, which also happened to be [unclear] support group, hired a whole new branch of biologists and naturalists and all kinds of people whose job, they knew about all this stuff that was down there and had to be saved—both the manmade and the natural, the cactus and all that stuff. There was a magnificent cactus that was one of these very rare crowned saguaros that’s got arms, and then it’s got a crown on the top of it, where they grew together. They’re fairly rare. There’s several of them in the Organ Pipe. And this old cactus was just in front of Hap Mountain. You have to go overland about, I don’t know, three, four miles to get there. I took several people down there, and took General Chandler down there and showed it to him when he was the wing commander here, right before I retired. And sad to say, it’s on the ground now, natural causes. They figured the thing was nearly 270 years old. One of these monsoons probably got it. I have a picture of it at home with my wife and me and some of our friends standing underneath it, because you could go down there on that place and wander around all you want to, as long as you sign the paperwork and go through and watch the right videos and stuff. So I took several people down there to see the place. And we got the range back with Air Force management, for a twenty-five-year period, which was great, and everybody was happy, and I think it will be really simple, at the end of that twenty-five-year period, which will probably be in another ten years or so now, to get that renewed without having to go through all that pain again. It should be just, “Hey, here’s the record we’ve got,” (boom), good to go—especially if the F-35 comes out here. It’s really important that we keep that complex. It’s really important that the F-35 comes here. But it’s a really good idea to maintain that property just like it is, because it’s not only used by Luke, but it’s used by Guard units from the East Coast who come out here in the wintertime, the snowbirds, the Tucson guys, Davis-Monthan guys.
GILLEN: Marines.
WYATT: Marines. Everybody. It’s a magnificent piece of air space, which is one of Luke’s long suits, and has been since it’s been here, to do that.
So anyway, we got all of that done and one fine day I got a call from the colonel’s group saying, “We got a job for you. You’re goin’ to Guam to run a command post.” And I said, “I don’t think so. I’ve got time and grade, and twenty-nine years is enough. I’ll see ya’.” So I hung around for another six or eight months General Esmond was the wing commander then. He moved on from there, before I retired, up to Nellis, to run the fire weapons school, [air warfare?] center. General Chandler came out and took the wing and retired me in ’96. And again, I took a week off, and the guys over at then Boeing called me and said, “How about coming over?” And they were MacDonald—no, Madesco [phonetic] is what they called themselves. “Come over and be a SAM instructor in F-16 weapons and stuff.” I said, “Okay.” So I did that. Then we became Boeing, because Boeing bought out MacDonald Douglas, and then Boeing lost the contract and Lockheed won it. So I worked for three different companies and never left the same desk. I did that for twelve years, and I don’t know where that time went. It amazes me to this day. I woke up one day and said, “Good grief, I’ve been here that long?!” And another contract was coming up, and I’ve got two grandkids that probably need more of my time than those simulators do. So we hung it up in ’96, and then 2008 from there. But I got to meet a lot of good guys that have gone on to do great things, guys that I remember for runnin’ the “B” courses out here. The first “B” course that we had in the F-15E had a guy who was what you might call a mild-mannered reporter, a very excellent aviator, not a loudmouth like most fighter pilots, very steady individual, first lieutenant, who left here and in the Gulf War was so good at his job, and so … well, they called him Killer, that was his nickname when he came out of there. He was so dynamic in combat, it’s like you’ve seen a lot of guys that happens to. He’s now a brigadier. He was a wing commander at Seymour Johnson when I went over to retire one of his classmates last year.
GILLEN: And who is this?
WYATT: His name is Kwast, K-W-A-S-T, Steve Kwast. He is now, if you look him up on the Air Force website, he is in command of some [Eric?] unit in Afghanistan—it’s either Afghanistan or—anyway, he’s over in the sandbox, for about probably the fifth time, because he went over there as a crew member and all that, and fought the first Gulf War. When I went over to retire one of his classmates, he was not there, he was TDY. I wanted to see him. That’s a long transition from a first lieutenant “B” course guy, that you followed all the way through to he’s a wing commander and a flag officer. Pretty amazing. But I have lots of stories like that of guys that I’ve known that have gone on and done great things.
I knew this guy who’s wing commander of the 56th Wing currently, when he was a captain, flying F-16s. That’s how long I’ve known him. And a whole bunch of other guys that are flag officers. Some of the guys at our leadership have retired. We lost one last year to an old Vietnam War wound that came back and got him, which had lain dormant for all these years, and then all of a sudden infection came.
GILLEN: Who was that?
WYATT: Dave Baker. Call name was Bull. He retired as a one-star. He was our dark gray, as we call it, ops group commander here, because we had two. Jim Klew [phonetic] was a light gray D.O., and Bull was a dark gray D.O. when we were standing that airplane up. He’s a very good friend of mine. Seymour did a flyover for him—it was at Arlington—it was amazing. The wing commander that replaced Kwast was up there representing the wing, and the flyover was just terrific, one of the best I’ve ever seen.
GILLEN: I think it’s a real good point, what you’re bringing out about the quality of people that come through here.
WYATT: Oh yeah.
GILLEN: I was even going to ask you, because I’ve been at Luke since December ’92, and I can tell you, I get a job offer at least every other year. People try to get me to go to San Antonio or Washington or Germany, and I do have family here, that’s part of the reason I stay here, but I love Luke. It’s an awesome place. It is a great place. And you’re kind of getting where you can maybe reflect on how you feel about Luke.
WYATT: Well, I��ll never leave here. Again, we’ve got family and kids here, but there’s no place…. I’ve often told my wife there’s only one other place that I would think about living, other than where we are right now, and that’s the hill country of Texas, north of San Antonio.
GILLEN: Real pretty.
WYATT: We have a terrific friend. She’s down there right now as a matter of fact, at his house visiting his wife whom they’ve known since grade school. He was a retired three-star, who was assistant vice chief of staff when he retired. Not bad work for a back-seater. But they live in Boerne about forty miles from Luckenbach. I love that country. I don’t know whether I could take the humidity. You know, when it gets a little bit humid out here in August, everybody calls how bad it is, and then I forget about other parts of the world. Luke, like I said, we’ve been here for twenty-two years now, and I consider it home. My two kids more or less grew up here. They were eleven and fifteen when we got here, but they both live here, and I don’t think they’ll ever leave either.
GILLEN: I think it’s kind of a pity that—the Phoenix area I think has a regard for Luke, definitely, but I think they are literally kind of not aware of what great things go on here, and the quality of people, the quality of work, how intense it is….
WYATT: I would assure you that nobody downtown does. Tom Browning did his best, and he helped a lot opening some eyes up in the downtown area. The west side people, they’re either big on it, or they’re our friends in El Mirage. But anyway, they realize what the impact is of this place being open every day out here. And I think they will continue to do so—especially with the complex that’s gonna grow down in Glendale towards here as a result of the football stadium and all that stuff over there. That’s going to be unrecognizable in the next few years, I think. So I would not leave here for any particular reason that I could think of. It’s just become part of the way of life, for us anyway. From all those years wearin’ a green bag and doin’ it, and flyin’ airplanes; and then all those years teaching simulators and stuff, I’ve watched all these people. Like you say, you think about the guys who commanded this base. You know, Marv Esmond [phonetic] retired three-star. Steve Plummer retired three-star. Howie Chandler’s now the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, four [unclear]. That’s not too shabby. How about Breedlove, who’s a three-star, who’s the chief operator of the Air Force. Hello?! So very few slugs have gone through this place, in the leadership position. We’ve been really fortunate in the last few years, the guys that are here.
GILLEN: Absolutely.
WYATT: And I don’t see any of that changing with the current leadership either. He’s gonna go and do good stuff. I think he’ll probably be gone this summer, but….
GILLEN: Yeah, it’s about that time for a change-out.
WYATT: Well, it’s a couple of years, you know.
GILLEN: Every two years.
WYATT: That would happen. And the future of Luke, if anybody has any sense and any position anywhere, the only place to put the F-35 schoolhouse is right here—regardless of what people around here think. I read the paper all the time about this recording they’ve got of an F-35 taking off at Egland. Well, they took it a hundred feet away from it! And the guys are gonna be at 1,500 feet and 85% power when they get climbin’ out of here, goin’ north, and it won’t…. Non-event. On the other hand, if the F-35 doesn’t come here, then I don’t know what’ll happen to Luke. No telling.
GILLEN: If you took a recording of an F-16 from a hundred feet, you’d be [unclear].
WYATT: Yeah. Apples are apples. So the only decision that I see anybody making wisely, is to put it here, primarily because the weather and that wonderful range complex that we don’t have to share so much; that we would, anywhere else in the world. Mountain Home has got a postage-stamp range. Winter weather? What?! You kiddin’ me?! Idaho?! Hello?! The Gulf Coast is saturated with test vehicles and the F-22 schoolhouse. So…. And there’s one Guard base somewhere that I saw in the paper recently, that had entered the fray. And I can’t imagine the Air Force giving the National Guard…. I forget where it was.
GILLEN: I can’t remember. Yeah, I saw that too.
WYATT: That schoolhouse job doesn’t need to go to the Guard unit. The Guard unit needs to stay right where they are, the experienced guys, combat experienced, ops guys, go down the road. There’s a big difference in runnin’ a schoolhouse and runnin’ an operational squadron. You have to make sure you can walk before you run with the “B” course guys. I used to tell my instructors, “You’ve got to remember a couple of things when you’re talking to people. If the guy is an experienced fighter guy in a transition course, and you tell him to do something on this mission, he’s going to do the exact opposite of what you tell him, because that’s the way they used to do it back where he came from. If you tell a ‘B’ course guy to do something, you better make damned sure that it’s exactly what you want him to do, because that’s exactly what he will do. And if you can remember that, you might get through this. And fortunately, most of 'em did, and we had a lot of good students and very talented individuals.
So my time at Luke was wonderful. Not many guys get to do what I got to do. We didn’t know when we got here that there’s a little check mark by our name down at MPC, says “these guys can’t move until Seymour Johnson stands up.” And I’m glad they didn’t tell us at the time, because we probably wouldn’t have done as good a job. But when we found out—you know, some of us had been here five or six years, goin’, “Something ought to be happening here.” “Oh, we didn’t tell ya’, you’re not done yet.” “Are you kiddin’?! Flyin’ an ‘E’ model out here in the desert? Put me in, coach! I can do that!” So there you have it.
GILLEN: That’s great.
WYATT: Hopefully that was what you’re lookin’ for.
GILLEN: Absolutely.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

T. J. Wyatt
May 11, 2010
Interviewer: Katherine Gillen
Re: Luke Air Force Base
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director: Diane Nevill
Transcribed by: Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona
GILLEN: Okay, today is May 11, 2010. This is the beginning of an interview with Retired Colonel T. J. Wyatt. Colonel Wyatt, can you tell us when you first came to Luke Air Force Base, and what it was like then?
WYATT: Sure. We arrived here in August of ’88, after having left a wonderful assignment at the Pentagon. I was fortunate enough to be asked to come out here to be in the initial cadre that flew in the F-15E. There were twenty-eight original guys, and they added a couple more of us in the middle of the summer of ’88. My initial job was with a training development squadron called Quad 4, who used to be right down the street here from the library. In that organization we had people from the F-16A, the F-16C, the Block 40 F-16, which was brand new then, and the F-15 and F-15E. And our job was to accept the coursewear that was being written by a contractor—which, by the way, still happens, which was a great idea—hire a bunch of old guys that used to fly airplanes to do that—to accept that coursewear for the schoolhouse for all those airplanes. That function since then has now moved back into the training squadron, so the 56th TRS houses the same kind of guys that do that, that we did in the old days back then. Well, I did that for a while, and then my number came up and I got checked out in the airplane in early ’89, and later on moved into an assistant ops officer job in the 550 Squadron, in that year of ’89. At that time here at Luke we had six or seven—I’d have to count 'em up—F-16 squadrons, including a reserve unit, the 302nd. And we had two squadrons of F-15A’s, basically, which were the “light grays” as we called ’em, the air superiority jets. The 555th and the 426th, the Claws and the Nickel, were flying those airplanes. We started out with the “E” model in the 461st Squadron, and it was in the building up here where the spikes are now. And if you look at the building number, the building number is 461—it just worked out that way. That building was built with F-15E money. But we all started there, and we were receiving the airplanes from the factory, which was kind of neat, to go pick up a brand new jet. As we said, “it’s got clean ashtrays.” Of course it doesn’t have any ashtrays in it, but…. We all got to go pick one up and bring it back. First time I’d ever been in an airplane that only had two hours on it. It was kind of neat. We sort of checked each other out as this initial instructor cadre. We had guys from everywhere, all walks of life, as we call it. We had a lot of F-4 guys, because the airplane was the grandson of the F-4 basically. All the things we couldn’t do in that old jet, we could do in the new one. Wise decisions were made by those in charge of then Tactical Air Command. Bob Russ was the commander then, a four-star. He more or less hand picked those guys. Out of thirty of us, I think we had twenty-six fighter weapons school graduates, which is enough to cause a riot, when you get that many geniuses in one room—from different airplanes even. We had 111 guys, which were experts at night terrain following, which we were gonna do in the “E” model; and fearless, I might add, after finding out how they did it in the old days. A lot of F-16 input, a lot of F-15 light gray, mostly a lot of F-4s, so we’re all mixed together here. And of that group, we started up the schoolhouse. And our job, according to Russ, was “spare no time in getting Seymour Johnson converted to the F-15E. Four squadrons at Seymour Johnson of F-4s at that time.
So away we went. We started, really, with what we called TX courses. Guys that were flying the F-4, transition them into the “E” model. These were experienced fighter guys. We didn’t do the first basic course for about six or eight months, because we wanted to get a cadre of those guys back over to Seymour. That was kind of neat. And about that time, we split into two squadrons, because we had each other checked out, and we had the airplanes then on the ramp. I think we had fourteen for each squadron. And so the 550th Squadron, which had been an F-15A squadron, along with the Jesters of the 461st, all four of those were light gray squadrons out here at one time. But at the time we got here, there were only two left, the nickel and five-oh. So some of us left the Jesters then and went down to the 550th Squadron, after that building stood up, and we started pumpin’ these guys through. And we got the “B” courses started. And that went on at a whirlwind pace. We got Seymour Johnson stood up just about a month before Desert Storm. And the first squadron that we had stood up initially, left there and deployed, boom, gone, and away we go with the first Gulf War. Well, things got a little hectic then. Some guys wanted to go. Most everybody here was volunteering to go over there, and all but about six or eight of us got turned down for one reason or another, because we had to keep the schoolhouse open. We had to stand up Mountain Home and … at that time it was supposed to be Clark Air Base, until the mountain blew up, and they ended up goin’ to Alaska. So we had a big charge to keep the airplane from … not slowing the pipeline down. So we couldn’t let everybody go. I think at one time we had eight or nine guys over there, and all of them flew in that first Gulf War, they were all veterans of that. Got them back about ’91, I think it was. The decision was made by some people who weren’t too smart, in my opinion, but nobody asked me. I had worked for one of 'em at the Pentagon, whom shall remain nameless because I consider him incompetent, and he only graduated as a four-star. But anyway, they made the decision to remove the F-15A airplane from here, and move it to Tyndall, Florida. Didn’t make any sense to anybody that’s ever flown out of Tyndall or Egland [phonetic] to do that. Egland is an operational unit, plus thousands of test airplanes that are down there. Not enough air space. When I was flying F-4s at Moody, we would try to go from Moody Air Force Base to Valasta [phonetic, Valdosta?], Georgia, and down the Gulf Coast to the Florida ranges where we could drop laser-guided weapons. And many, many, many times we’d be on the way down there with a four-ship, and we’d be about ten minutes out, and they’d call us and cancel our air space because some test guy had to do somethin’.
So knowing that, I said, “Where are they gonna put all these….” These guys have gotta have lots of high-speed ranges to do supersonic intercepts and stuff like that, which is perfect out here on the Goldwater Range complex, and had been forever. But like I said, nobody asked me, and away they went. So those two squadrons, the Claws, the 426th and the then Triple Nickel [555th], were in the building that now houses the flight surgeon’s office, up here by the big curve. The 309th, I think, was in the other side of that building, and they just moved over on the south end of the base, and that’s where both those light gray squadrons were. Their jets were parked up there where the Singapore F 16s are now. So boom, they’re gone, and there’s two squadrons of us left. At the time, General Browning was the air division commander. We had two wings here. We had the 405th Wing, which was the F-15 wing, and the 58th Wing, which was the F-16 wing. And the two of them together made the 832nd Air Division, of which he was the boss, a brigadier, and a super guy—really super guy. He decided, having been a former Triple Nickel commander, that that flag wasn’t leavin’ here. So he stood down the Five-Oh, and moved the Nickel flag to the 550th Squadron where we were. At the time, I had gone back and became the commander of the Quad Four Squadron. No, that hadn’t happened yet: I was the ops O. in the Five-Oh, and got a chance to be the commander after I’d been the ops officer in the Five-Oh, to the commander. Went back to the Quad Four and ran that place for about a year, and then lo and behold, during that period, the Nickel flag moved from the old light grays to the Five-Oh Squadron. We rolled up the 550th Squadron, and now we had the 461st and 555th flyin’ the “E” Model. Time came for a change in command in the Nickel, and lo and behold, I was thrown into the mix and got the job, which was the best job I ever had in my life—ever—was running that organization. I had some tremendous talented guys in that squadron—unbelievable. We took a team up, we got drawn to compete in a thing called Long Shot up at Nellis, where we took on the entire tactical air forces and won it, the whole thing. It was awesome. Those guys are all scattered out and flyin’ for Southwest and who knows where now. But it was a great time.
We kept on crankin’ out guys to stand up Mountain Home, and Elmandorf [phonetic] in the “E” Model during al that time. A lot of “B” course at that time, because we didn’t have as many transition guys as we’d been doin’, because we started with them. So another wise decision was made, much to our chagrin, in the ’93 or ’94 time frame, to send the “E” Models out of here to Seymour Johnson, and move the schoolhouse over there, and take one of those squadrons that was an operational squadron, and turn it into a schoolhouse squadron, which meant a smaller schoolhouse. I think we usually had fourteen jets, and they had twenty in that one squadron, so it was a little bit bigger, but not as big as the two squadrons that were out here.
GILLEN: Was that after we had changed from ACC to AETC?
WYATT: That happened in ’94.
GILLEN: That’s after.
WYATT: Yeah. When we took the last three “E” Models out of here to Seymour Johnson, in the spring of ’94, and we had become ACC then, and at that time had become the 56th Wing.
GILLEN: AETC, because that was, I think, ’93 we went from ACC to AETC.
WYATT: ’93 to AETC, and ’94 we became the 56th Wing, because somebody wanted to match up all the squadron numbers that were down at MacDill [phonetic] when MacDill went away. So we had some of 'em out here. So they decided to move them out here and move the flag out here. And so the air division went away, the 405th Wing went away, and now there’s one wing.
GILLEN: The 56th Fighter Wing.
WYATT: 56th Fighter Wing. We were part of that for a small time, until ’95. March of ’95, we took the last three out of here. So when I got here, we had two airplanes, and I was in the last three-ship that left—as a matter of fact, the lead airplane, me and Tex Mascot [phonetic]. Carried 'em over there, and the F-15 era at Luke ended, from all those years that the light grays had been here, and the initial stand-up. And the shame of a lot of this is, after I retired and worked for Lockheed Martin, teaching simulators and academics over there, a lot of the young kids that come along now, the F-16 guys, don’t even know that ever happened. They didn’t know the Nickel was ever an F-15E squadron, they didn’t know they were here for that long—which is kind of a shame to some of us, but those of us who know, it doesn’t matter.
Then we started to lose some F-16 stuff here late. Of course the [Breck?] moved a lot of air frames. They were flying some older jets here, but hopefully things are stable now. Just took down the 63rd Squadron not too long ago.
GILLEN: We’re kind of jumpin’ ahead a little bit.
WYATT: Yeah. But we’re talkin’ about airplanes. Anyway, along about then in ’92, I was lucky enough to get promoted out of a job. About two weeks after the colonels list came out, then ops group commander says, “You can come on over here, we’re gonna have your change of command in two weeks.” And I became what they called a silver leaf lounge guy, which carried the radio for the ops group commander when he didn’t want to. And that still goes on today, by the way. Spent a lot of nights out here, with a brick in my hand, but that was okay. So I just did that for a while, and then one day I was at the club, talking to Sam Young at lunch, who was a support group commander at that time, and he asked me a few things that didn’t make much sense at the time, and then about a week later, General Plummer [phonetic], who was a wing commander then, called me over and said, “Boy, have I got a job for you! You’ve had your fun….” We still had some jets here then, it was just right at the end of it, because he let me fly a couple times. He said, “You’re gonna be the deputy support group commander.” “What?!” “You heard me, you’ve had your fun.” I still think to this day that there was some behind-the-scenes thing that happened to make that happen. And two things make me think that: I got over there and stumbled around in the [brock?] house, trying to figure out what all these squadrons did, and who they were, and all this—big education for me, having been around airplanes all my life. But at the time, Sam started handing me more and more stuff to look at. And about three months after I was over there, he comes in one day and politely announces that he’s retiring. And I said, “What?!” “Yes, thirty years, I’m done.” Well, guess who got him a job? Tom Browning—got him a job at the Arizona Republic, which I said, “How long has that been in the works? So who’s gonna be the commander?” “You are, for the time being, until we figure out who it’s gonna be. Oh, by the way, you’re also gonna oversee the environmental impact study for the closing of Gila Bend as a military installation and contract it.” “What?!” Well, that fits, because I’m an airplane guy; and that operation down there was a squadron underneath a support group until the study proved that it would be cheaper to contract it and do away with it, which I still don’t think was right either, but once again, nobody asked me. So I had to go around, holding all these sessions all over Arizona, to begin the environmental impact statement work because the lease on the range was coming up. Because of the place goin’ contract and the lease comin’ up on the property itself, there was a lot of work to do to get that done. We had sessions at Tucson, and then the Indian nations, and at Ajo and Gila Bend, and just about everywhere—up here and all the places you’d think would be impacted by it. And as I got into that, I discovered that I thought we may have some problem with environmentalists, but for the most part, they were big on our side for the Air Force to gain complete control of that whole 3 million acres down there. The primary reason was they felt that the Bureau of Land Management, which currently had that job, didn’t have enough people to oversee it. And about that time was when we were goin’ through the antelope business, about how many of those things are left, and are they true Sonoran antelope, or what are they? So we had to get all that straightened out, and we jumped in there and helped 'em with that.
People wanted to preserve the Cabeza Prieta, which is a pristine piece of land right in the middle of the thing on the southern end, on the edge of the south tac range. Fortunately, we didn’t impact it, and to this day, of all of that acreage down there, only 3% of that land is impacted with weapons, and most of them are practice bombs. On every range of the tactical ranges, there’s three, the east, north, and south tac range. There’s one target that you can drop live weapons on. And that has to be cleaned up by government regulation periodically. All the rest of 'em are practice bombs, and they’re also in the clean-up, strict schedule.
GILLEN: I think we’re real lucky, actually. I’ll just put my little editorial comment, that the Air Force has maintained that big amount of desert. I was fortunate enough, I actually went down there—another endangered species is the bat, and I volunteered, actually, to spend the night down there and watch for bats going to their rookery. And I’ve never been in a place where you could see that many stars, and the temperature went from like 109 during the day, to probably like 69, because the desert was just [bare?].
WYATT: If you have never been down there, you’ve missed something.
GILLEN: Yes.
WYATT: I’ve been all over that range on the ground.
GILLEN: It’s an amazing place.
WYATT: I’ve been places where there’s a lot of petroglyphs. We found human habitat with the ceilings of it still blackened from the smoke from their fires. Found a couple of wells. The Thanksgiving Day Well is a fascinating place. We couldn’t find the bottom to it with those aluminum poles you use to clean swimming pools. You think it’s neat down there at night—I’ve been there at night many times—but stranger is to go down there in the middle of the afternoon, over there by the Thanksgiving Day Well, there’s total silence. You don’t hear anything. You can’t hear jets flying, you can’t hear anything. It’s kind of spooky in the daytime for it to be that quiet. And in the night, like you say, the sky is awesome.
So we got all that done, again, because the Air Force was willing to tell these folks, “Hey, we’re gonna oversee it, we’re gonna look after it.” During that process, the engineering squadron here, which also happened to be [unclear] support group, hired a whole new branch of biologists and naturalists and all kinds of people whose job, they knew about all this stuff that was down there and had to be saved—both the manmade and the natural, the cactus and all that stuff. There was a magnificent cactus that was one of these very rare crowned saguaros that’s got arms, and then it’s got a crown on the top of it, where they grew together. They’re fairly rare. There’s several of them in the Organ Pipe. And this old cactus was just in front of Hap Mountain. You have to go overland about, I don’t know, three, four miles to get there. I took several people down there, and took General Chandler down there and showed it to him when he was the wing commander here, right before I retired. And sad to say, it’s on the ground now, natural causes. They figured the thing was nearly 270 years old. One of these monsoons probably got it. I have a picture of it at home with my wife and me and some of our friends standing underneath it, because you could go down there on that place and wander around all you want to, as long as you sign the paperwork and go through and watch the right videos and stuff. So I took several people down there to see the place. And we got the range back with Air Force management, for a twenty-five-year period, which was great, and everybody was happy, and I think it will be really simple, at the end of that twenty-five-year period, which will probably be in another ten years or so now, to get that renewed without having to go through all that pain again. It should be just, “Hey, here’s the record we’ve got,” (boom), good to go—especially if the F-35 comes out here. It’s really important that we keep that complex. It’s really important that the F-35 comes here. But it’s a really good idea to maintain that property just like it is, because it’s not only used by Luke, but it’s used by Guard units from the East Coast who come out here in the wintertime, the snowbirds, the Tucson guys, Davis-Monthan guys.
GILLEN: Marines.
WYATT: Marines. Everybody. It’s a magnificent piece of air space, which is one of Luke’s long suits, and has been since it’s been here, to do that.
So anyway, we got all of that done and one fine day I got a call from the colonel’s group saying, “We got a job for you. You’re goin’ to Guam to run a command post.” And I said, “I don’t think so. I’ve got time and grade, and twenty-nine years is enough. I’ll see ya’.” So I hung around for another six or eight months General Esmond was the wing commander then. He moved on from there, before I retired, up to Nellis, to run the fire weapons school, [air warfare?] center. General Chandler came out and took the wing and retired me in ’96. And again, I took a week off, and the guys over at then Boeing called me and said, “How about coming over?” And they were MacDonald—no, Madesco [phonetic] is what they called themselves. “Come over and be a SAM instructor in F-16 weapons and stuff.” I said, “Okay.” So I did that. Then we became Boeing, because Boeing bought out MacDonald Douglas, and then Boeing lost the contract and Lockheed won it. So I worked for three different companies and never left the same desk. I did that for twelve years, and I don’t know where that time went. It amazes me to this day. I woke up one day and said, “Good grief, I’ve been here that long?!” And another contract was coming up, and I’ve got two grandkids that probably need more of my time than those simulators do. So we hung it up in ’96, and then 2008 from there. But I got to meet a lot of good guys that have gone on to do great things, guys that I remember for runnin’ the “B” courses out here. The first “B” course that we had in the F-15E had a guy who was what you might call a mild-mannered reporter, a very excellent aviator, not a loudmouth like most fighter pilots, very steady individual, first lieutenant, who left here and in the Gulf War was so good at his job, and so … well, they called him Killer, that was his nickname when he came out of there. He was so dynamic in combat, it’s like you’ve seen a lot of guys that happens to. He’s now a brigadier. He was a wing commander at Seymour Johnson when I went over to retire one of his classmates last year.
GILLEN: And who is this?
WYATT: His name is Kwast, K-W-A-S-T, Steve Kwast. He is now, if you look him up on the Air Force website, he is in command of some [Eric?] unit in Afghanistan—it’s either Afghanistan or—anyway, he’s over in the sandbox, for about probably the fifth time, because he went over there as a crew member and all that, and fought the first Gulf War. When I went over to retire one of his classmates, he was not there, he was TDY. I wanted to see him. That’s a long transition from a first lieutenant “B” course guy, that you followed all the way through to he’s a wing commander and a flag officer. Pretty amazing. But I have lots of stories like that of guys that I’ve known that have gone on and done great things.
I knew this guy who’s wing commander of the 56th Wing currently, when he was a captain, flying F-16s. That’s how long I’ve known him. And a whole bunch of other guys that are flag officers. Some of the guys at our leadership have retired. We lost one last year to an old Vietnam War wound that came back and got him, which had lain dormant for all these years, and then all of a sudden infection came.
GILLEN: Who was that?
WYATT: Dave Baker. Call name was Bull. He retired as a one-star. He was our dark gray, as we call it, ops group commander here, because we had two. Jim Klew [phonetic] was a light gray D.O., and Bull was a dark gray D.O. when we were standing that airplane up. He’s a very good friend of mine. Seymour did a flyover for him—it was at Arlington—it was amazing. The wing commander that replaced Kwast was up there representing the wing, and the flyover was just terrific, one of the best I’ve ever seen.
GILLEN: I think it’s a real good point, what you’re bringing out about the quality of people that come through here.
WYATT: Oh yeah.
GILLEN: I was even going to ask you, because I’ve been at Luke since December ’92, and I can tell you, I get a job offer at least every other year. People try to get me to go to San Antonio or Washington or Germany, and I do have family here, that’s part of the reason I stay here, but I love Luke. It’s an awesome place. It is a great place. And you’re kind of getting where you can maybe reflect on how you feel about Luke.
WYATT: Well, I’ll never leave here. Again, we’ve got family and kids here, but there’s no place…. I’ve often told my wife there’s only one other place that I would think about living, other than where we are right now, and that’s the hill country of Texas, north of San Antonio.
GILLEN: Real pretty.
WYATT: We have a terrific friend. She’s down there right now as a matter of fact, at his house visiting his wife whom they’ve known since grade school. He was a retired three-star, who was assistant vice chief of staff when he retired. Not bad work for a back-seater. But they live in Boerne about forty miles from Luckenbach. I love that country. I don’t know whether I could take the humidity. You know, when it gets a little bit humid out here in August, everybody calls how bad it is, and then I forget about other parts of the world. Luke, like I said, we’ve been here for twenty-two years now, and I consider it home. My two kids more or less grew up here. They were eleven and fifteen when we got here, but they both live here, and I don’t think they’ll ever leave either.
GILLEN: I think it’s kind of a pity that—the Phoenix area I think has a regard for Luke, definitely, but I think they are literally kind of not aware of what great things go on here, and the quality of people, the quality of work, how intense it is….
WYATT: I would assure you that nobody downtown does. Tom Browning did his best, and he helped a lot opening some eyes up in the downtown area. The west side people, they’re either big on it, or they’re our friends in El Mirage. But anyway, they realize what the impact is of this place being open every day out here. And I think they will continue to do so—especially with the complex that’s gonna grow down in Glendale towards here as a result of the football stadium and all that stuff over there. That’s going to be unrecognizable in the next few years, I think. So I would not leave here for any particular reason that I could think of. It’s just become part of the way of life, for us anyway. From all those years wearin’ a green bag and doin’ it, and flyin’ airplanes; and then all those years teaching simulators and stuff, I’ve watched all these people. Like you say, you think about the guys who commanded this base. You know, Marv Esmond [phonetic] retired three-star. Steve Plummer retired three-star. Howie Chandler’s now the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, four [unclear]. That’s not too shabby. How about Breedlove, who’s a three-star, who’s the chief operator of the Air Force. Hello?! So very few slugs have gone through this place, in the leadership position. We’ve been really fortunate in the last few years, the guys that are here.
GILLEN: Absolutely.
WYATT: And I don’t see any of that changing with the current leadership either. He’s gonna go and do good stuff. I think he’ll probably be gone this summer, but….
GILLEN: Yeah, it’s about that time for a change-out.
WYATT: Well, it’s a couple of years, you know.
GILLEN: Every two years.
WYATT: That would happen. And the future of Luke, if anybody has any sense and any position anywhere, the only place to put the F-35 schoolhouse is right here—regardless of what people around here think. I read the paper all the time about this recording they’ve got of an F-35 taking off at Egland. Well, they took it a hundred feet away from it! And the guys are gonna be at 1,500 feet and 85% power when they get climbin’ out of here, goin’ north, and it won’t…. Non-event. On the other hand, if the F-35 doesn’t come here, then I don’t know what’ll happen to Luke. No telling.
GILLEN: If you took a recording of an F-16 from a hundred feet, you’d be [unclear].
WYATT: Yeah. Apples are apples. So the only decision that I see anybody making wisely, is to put it here, primarily because the weather and that wonderful range complex that we don’t have to share so much; that we would, anywhere else in the world. Mountain Home has got a postage-stamp range. Winter weather? What?! You kiddin’ me?! Idaho?! Hello?! The Gulf Coast is saturated with test vehicles and the F-22 schoolhouse. So…. And there’s one Guard base somewhere that I saw in the paper recently, that had entered the fray. And I can’t imagine the Air Force giving the National Guard…. I forget where it was.
GILLEN: I can’t remember. Yeah, I saw that too.
WYATT: That schoolhouse job doesn’t need to go to the Guard unit. The Guard unit needs to stay right where they are, the experienced guys, combat experienced, ops guys, go down the road. There’s a big difference in runnin’ a schoolhouse and runnin’ an operational squadron. You have to make sure you can walk before you run with the “B” course guys. I used to tell my instructors, “You’ve got to remember a couple of things when you’re talking to people. If the guy is an experienced fighter guy in a transition course, and you tell him to do something on this mission, he’s going to do the exact opposite of what you tell him, because that’s the way they used to do it back where he came from. If you tell a ‘B’ course guy to do something, you better make damned sure that it’s exactly what you want him to do, because that’s exactly what he will do. And if you can remember that, you might get through this. And fortunately, most of 'em did, and we had a lot of good students and very talented individuals.
So my time at Luke was wonderful. Not many guys get to do what I got to do. We didn’t know when we got here that there’s a little check mark by our name down at MPC, says “these guys can’t move until Seymour Johnson stands up.” And I’m glad they didn’t tell us at the time, because we probably wouldn’t have done as good a job. But when we found out—you know, some of us had been here five or six years, goin’, “Something ought to be happening here.” “Oh, we didn’t tell ya’, you’re not done yet.” “Are you kiddin’?! Flyin’ an ‘E’ model out here in the desert? Put me in, coach! I can do that!” So there you have it.
GILLEN: That’s great.
WYATT: Hopefully that was what you’re lookin’ for.
GILLEN: Absolutely.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

T. J. Wyatt
May 11, 2010
Interviewer: Katherine Gillen
Re: Luke Air Force Base
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director: Diane Nevill
Transcribed by: Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona
GILLEN: Okay, today is May 11, 2010. This is the beginning of an interview with Retired Colonel T. J. Wyatt. Colonel Wyatt, can you tell us when you first came to Luke Air Force Base, and what it was like then?
WYATT: Sure. We arrived here in August of ’88, after having left a wonderful assignment at the Pentagon. I was fortunate enough to be asked to come out here to be in the initial cadre that flew in the F-15E. There were twenty-eight original guys, and they added a couple more of us in the middle of the summer of ’88. My initial job was with a training development squadron called Quad 4, who used to be right down the street here from the library. In that organization we had people from the F-16A, the F-16C, the Block 40 F-16, which was brand new then, and the F-15 and F-15E. And our job was to accept the coursewear that was being written by a contractor—which, by the way, still happens, which was a great idea—hire a bunch of old guys that used to fly airplanes to do that—to accept that coursewear for the schoolhouse for all those airplanes. That function since then has now moved back into the training squadron, so the 56th TRS houses the same kind of guys that do that, that we did in the old days back then. Well, I did that for a while, and then my number came up and I got checked out in the airplane in early ’89, and later on moved into an assistant ops officer job in the 550 Squadron, in that year of ’89. At that time here at Luke we had six or seven—I’d have to count 'em up—F-16 squadrons, including a reserve unit, the 302nd. And we had two squadrons of F-15A’s, basically, which were the “light grays” as we called ’em, the air superiority jets. The 555th and the 426th, the Claws and the Nickel, were flying those airplanes. We started out with the “E” model in the 461st Squadron, and it was in the building up here where the spikes are now. And if you look at the building number, the building number is 461—it just worked out that way. That building was built with F-15E money. But we all started there, and we were receiving the airplanes from the factory, which was kind of neat, to go pick up a brand new jet. As we said, “it’s got clean ashtrays.” Of course it doesn’t have any ashtrays in it, but…. We all got to go pick one up and bring it back. First time I’d ever been in an airplane that only had two hours on it. It was kind of neat. We sort of checked each other out as this initial instructor cadre. We had guys from everywhere, all walks of life, as we call it. We had a lot of F-4 guys, because the airplane was the grandson of the F-4 basically. All the things we couldn’t do in that old jet, we could do in the new one. Wise decisions were made by those in charge of then Tactical Air Command. Bob Russ was the commander then, a four-star. He more or less hand picked those guys. Out of thirty of us, I think we had twenty-six fighter weapons school graduates, which is enough to cause a riot, when you get that many geniuses in one room—from different airplanes even. We had 111 guys, which were experts at night terrain following, which we were gonna do in the “E” model; and fearless, I might add, after finding out how they did it in the old days. A lot of F-16 input, a lot of F-15 light gray, mostly a lot of F-4s, so we’re all mixed together here. And of that group, we started up the schoolhouse. And our job, according to Russ, was “spare no time in getting Seymour Johnson converted to the F-15E. Four squadrons at Seymour Johnson of F-4s at that time.
So away we went. We started, really, with what we called TX courses. Guys that were flying the F-4, transition them into the “E” model. These were experienced fighter guys. We didn’t do the first basic course for about six or eight months, because we wanted to get a cadre of those guys back over to Seymour. That was kind of neat. And about that time, we split into two squadrons, because we had each other checked out, and we had the airplanes then on the ramp. I think we had fourteen for each squadron. And so the 550th Squadron, which had been an F-15A squadron, along with the Jesters of the 461st, all four of those were light gray squadrons out here at one time. But at the time we got here, there were only two left, the nickel and five-oh. So some of us left the Jesters then and went down to the 550th Squadron, after that building stood up, and we started pumpin’ these guys through. And we got the “B” courses started. And that went on at a whirlwind pace. We got Seymour Johnson stood up just about a month before Desert Storm. And the first squadron that we had stood up initially, left there and deployed, boom, gone, and away we go with the first Gulf War. Well, things got a little hectic then. Some guys wanted to go. Most everybody here was volunteering to go over there, and all but about six or eight of us got turned down for one reason or another, because we had to keep the schoolhouse open. We had to stand up Mountain Home and … at that time it was supposed to be Clark Air Base, until the mountain blew up, and they ended up goin’ to Alaska. So we had a big charge to keep the airplane from … not slowing the pipeline down. So we couldn’t let everybody go. I think at one time we had eight or nine guys over there, and all of them flew in that first Gulf War, they were all veterans of that. Got them back about ’91, I think it was. The decision was made by some people who weren’t too smart, in my opinion, but nobody asked me. I had worked for one of 'em at the Pentagon, whom shall remain nameless because I consider him incompetent, and he only graduated as a four-star. But anyway, they made the decision to remove the F-15A airplane from here, and move it to Tyndall, Florida. Didn’t make any sense to anybody that’s ever flown out of Tyndall or Egland [phonetic] to do that. Egland is an operational unit, plus thousands of test airplanes that are down there. Not enough air space. When I was flying F-4s at Moody, we would try to go from Moody Air Force Base to Valasta [phonetic, Valdosta?], Georgia, and down the Gulf Coast to the Florida ranges where we could drop laser-guided weapons. And many, many, many times we’d be on the way down there with a four-ship, and we’d be about ten minutes out, and they’d call us and cancel our air space because some test guy had to do somethin’.
So knowing that, I said, “Where are they gonna put all these….” These guys have gotta have lots of high-speed ranges to do supersonic intercepts and stuff like that, which is perfect out here on the Goldwater Range complex, and had been forever. But like I said, nobody asked me, and away they went. So those two squadrons, the Claws, the 426th and the then Triple Nickel [555th], were in the building that now houses the flight surgeon’s office, up here by the big curve. The 309th, I think, was in the other side of that building, and they just moved over on the south end of the base, and that’s where both those light gray squadrons were. Their jets were parked up there where the Singapore F 16s are now. So boom, they’re gone, and there’s two squadrons of us left. At the time, General Browning was the air division commander. We had two wings here. We had the 405th Wing, which was the F-15 wing, and the 58th Wing, which was the F-16 wing. And the two of them together made the 832nd Air Division, of which he was the boss, a brigadier, and a super guy—really super guy. He decided, having been a former Triple Nickel commander, that that flag wasn’t leavin’ here. So he stood down the Five-Oh, and moved the Nickel flag to the 550th Squadron where we were. At the time, I had gone back and became the commander of the Quad Four Squadron. No, that hadn’t happened yet: I was the ops O. in the Five-Oh, and got a chance to be the commander after I’d been the ops officer in the Five-Oh, to the commander. Went back to the Quad Four and ran that place for about a year, and then lo and behold, during that period, the Nickel flag moved from the old light grays to the Five-Oh Squadron. We rolled up the 550th Squadron, and now we had the 461st and 555th flyin’ the “E” Model. Time came for a change in command in the Nickel, and lo and behold, I was thrown into the mix and got the job, which was the best job I ever had in my life—ever—was running that organization. I had some tremendous talented guys in that squadron—unbelievable. We took a team up, we got drawn to compete in a thing called Long Shot up at Nellis, where we took on the entire tactical air forces and won it, the whole thing. It was awesome. Those guys are all scattered out and flyin’ for Southwest and who knows where now. But it was a great time.
We kept on crankin’ out guys to stand up Mountain Home, and Elmandorf [phonetic] in the “E” Model during al that time. A lot of “B” course at that time, because we didn’t have as many transition guys as we’d been doin’, because we started with them. So another wise decision was made, much to our chagrin, in the ’93 or ’94 time frame, to send the “E” Models out of here to Seymour Johnson, and move the schoolhouse over there, and take one of those squadrons that was an operational squadron, and turn it into a schoolhouse squadron, which meant a smaller schoolhouse. I think we usually had fourteen jets, and they had twenty in that one squadron, so it was a little bit bigger, but not as big as the two squadrons that were out here.
GILLEN: Was that after we had changed from ACC to AETC?
WYATT: That happened in ’94.
GILLEN: That’s after.
WYATT: Yeah. When we took the last three “E” Models out of here to Seymour Johnson, in the spring of ’94, and we had become ACC then, and at that time had become the 56th Wing.
GILLEN: AETC, because that was, I think, ’93 we went from ACC to AETC.
WYATT: ’93 to AETC, and ’94 we became the 56th Wing, because somebody wanted to match up all the squadron numbers that were down at MacDill [phonetic] when MacDill went away. So we had some of 'em out here. So they decided to move them out here and move the flag out here. And so the air division went away, the 405th Wing went away, and now there’s one wing.
GILLEN: The 56th Fighter Wing.
WYATT: 56th Fighter Wing. We were part of that for a small time, until ’95. March of ’95, we took the last three out of here. So when I got here, we had two airplanes, and I was in the last three-ship that left—as a matter of fact, the lead airplane, me and Tex Mascot [phonetic]. Carried 'em over there, and the F-15 era at Luke ended, from all those years that the light grays had been here, and the initial stand-up. And the shame of a lot of this is, after I retired and worked for Lockheed Martin, teaching simulators and academics over there, a lot of the young kids that come along now, the F-16 guys, don’t even know that ever happened. They didn’t know the Nickel was ever an F-15E squadron, they didn’t know they were here for that long—which is kind of a shame to some of us, but those of us who know, it doesn’t matter.
Then we started to lose some F-16 stuff here late. Of course the [Breck?] moved a lot of air frames. They were flying some older jets here, but hopefully things are stable now. Just took down the 63rd Squadron not too long ago.
GILLEN: We’re kind of jumpin’ ahead a little bit.
WYATT: Yeah. But we’re talkin’ about airplanes. Anyway, along about then in ’92, I was lucky enough to get promoted out of a job. About two weeks after the colonels list came out, then ops group commander says, “You can come on over here, we’re gonna have your change of command in two weeks.” And I became what they called a silver leaf lounge guy, which carried the radio for the ops group commander when he didn’t want to. And that still goes on today, by the way. Spent a lot of nights out here, with a brick in my hand, but that was okay. So I just did that for a while, and then one day I was at the club, talking to Sam Young at lunch, who was a support group commander at that time, and he asked me a few things that didn’t make much sense at the time, and then about a week later, General Plummer [phonetic], who was a wing commander then, called me over and said, “Boy, have I got a job for you! You’ve had your fun….” We still had some jets here then, it was just right at the end of it, because he let me fly a couple times. He said, “You’re gonna be the deputy support group commander.” “What?!” “You heard me, you’ve had your fun.” I still think to this day that there was some behind-the-scenes thing that happened to make that happen. And two things make me think that: I got over there and stumbled around in the [brock?] house, trying to figure out what all these squadrons did, and who they were, and all this—big education for me, having been around airplanes all my life. But at the time, Sam started handing me more and more stuff to look at. And about three months after I was over there, he comes in one day and politely announces that he’s retiring. And I said, “What?!” “Yes, thirty years, I’m done.” Well, guess who got him a job? Tom Browning—got him a job at the Arizona Republic, which I said, “How long has that been in the works? So who’s gonna be the commander?” “You are, for the time being, until we figure out who it’s gonna be. Oh, by the way, you’re also gonna oversee the environmental impact study for the closing of Gila Bend as a military installation and contract it.” “What?!” Well, that fits, because I’m an airplane guy; and that operation down there was a squadron underneath a support group until the study proved that it would be cheaper to contract it and do away with it, which I still don’t think was right either, but once again, nobody asked me. So I had to go around, holding all these sessions all over Arizona, to begin the environmental impact statement work because the lease on the range was coming up. Because of the place goin’ contract and the lease comin’ up on the property itself, there was a lot of work to do to get that done. We had sessions at Tucson, and then the Indian nations, and at Ajo and Gila Bend, and just about everywhere—up here and all the places you’d think would be impacted by it. And as I got into that, I discovered that I thought we may have some problem with environmentalists, but for the most part, they were big on our side for the Air Force to gain complete control of that whole 3 million acres down there. The primary reason was they felt that the Bureau of Land Management, which currently had that job, didn’t have enough people to oversee it. And about that time was when we were goin’ through the antelope business, about how many of those things are left, and are they true Sonoran antelope, or what are they? So we had to get all that straightened out, and we jumped in there and helped 'em with that.
People wanted to preserve the Cabeza Prieta, which is a pristine piece of land right in the middle of the thing on the southern end, on the edge of the south tac range. Fortunately, we didn’t impact it, and to this day, of all of that acreage down there, only 3% of that land is impacted with weapons, and most of them are practice bombs. On every range of the tactical ranges, there’s three, the east, north, and south tac range. There’s one target that you can drop live weapons on. And that has to be cleaned up by government regulation periodically. All the rest of 'em are practice bombs, and they’re also in the clean-up, strict schedule.
GILLEN: I think we’re real lucky, actually. I’ll just put my little editorial comment, that the Air Force has maintained that big amount of desert. I was fortunate enough, I actually went down there—another endangered species is the bat, and I volunteered, actually, to spend the night down there and watch for bats going to their rookery. And I’ve never been in a place where you could see that many stars, and the temperature went from like 109 during the day, to probably like 69, because the desert was just [bare?].
WYATT: If you have never been down there, you’ve missed something.
GILLEN: Yes.
WYATT: I’ve been all over that range on the ground.
GILLEN: It’s an amazing place.
WYATT: I’ve been places where there’s a lot of petroglyphs. We found human habitat with the ceilings of it still blackened from the smoke from their fires. Found a couple of wells. The Thanksgiving Day Well is a fascinating place. We couldn’t find the bottom to it with those aluminum poles you use to clean swimming pools. You think it’s neat down there at night—I’ve been there at night many times—but stranger is to go down there in the middle of the afternoon, over there by the Thanksgiving Day Well, there’s total silence. You don’t hear anything. You can’t hear jets flying, you can’t hear anything. It’s kind of spooky in the daytime for it to be that quiet. And in the night, like you say, the sky is awesome.
So we got all that done, again, because the Air Force was willing to tell these folks, “Hey, we’re gonna oversee it, we’re gonna look after it.” During that process, the engineering squadron here, which also happened to be [unclear] support group, hired a whole new branch of biologists and naturalists and all kinds of people whose job, they knew about all this stuff that was down there and had to be saved—both the manmade and the natural, the cactus and all that stuff. There was a magnificent cactus that was one of these very rare crowned saguaros that’s got arms, and then it’s got a crown on the top of it, where they grew together. They’re fairly rare. There’s several of them in the Organ Pipe. And this old cactus was just in front of Hap Mountain. You have to go overland about, I don’t know, three, four miles to get there. I took several people down there, and took General Chandler down there and showed it to him when he was the wing commander here, right before I retired. And sad to say, it’s on the ground now, natural causes. They figured the thing was nearly 270 years old. One of these monsoons probably got it. I have a picture of it at home with my wife and me and some of our friends standing underneath it, because you could go down there on that place and wander around all you want to, as long as you sign the paperwork and go through and watch the right videos and stuff. So I took several people down there to see the place. And we got the range back with Air Force management, for a twenty-five-year period, which was great, and everybody was happy, and I think it will be really simple, at the end of that twenty-five-year period, which will probably be in another ten years or so now, to get that renewed without having to go through all that pain again. It should be just, “Hey, here’s the record we’ve got,” (boom), good to go—especially if the F-35 comes out here. It’s really important that we keep that complex. It’s really important that the F-35 comes here. But it’s a really good idea to maintain that property just like it is, because it’s not only used by Luke, but it’s used by Guard units from the East Coast who come out here in the wintertime, the snowbirds, the Tucson guys, Davis-Monthan guys.
GILLEN: Marines.
WYATT: Marines. Everybody. It’s a magnificent piece of air space, which is one of Luke’s long suits, and has been since it’s been here, to do that.
So anyway, we got all of that done and one fine day I got a call from the colonel’s group saying, “We got a job for you. You’re goin’ to Guam to run a command post.” And I said, “I don’t think so. I’ve got time and grade, and twenty-nine years is enough. I’ll see ya’.” So I hung around for another six or eight months General Esmond was the wing commander then. He moved on from there, before I retired, up to Nellis, to run the fire weapons school, [air warfare?] center. General Chandler came out and took the wing and retired me in ’96. And again, I took a week off, and the guys over at then Boeing called me and said, “How about coming over?” And they were MacDonald—no, Madesco [phonetic] is what they called themselves. “Come over and be a SAM instructor in F-16 weapons and stuff.” I said, “Okay.” So I did that. Then we became Boeing, because Boeing bought out MacDonald Douglas, and then Boeing lost the contract and Lockheed won it. So I worked for three different companies and never left the same desk. I did that for twelve years, and I don’t know where that time went. It amazes me to this day. I woke up one day and said, “Good grief, I’ve been here that long?!” And another contract was coming up, and I’ve got two grandkids that probably need more of my time than those simulators do. So we hung it up in ’96, and then 2008 from there. But I got to meet a lot of good guys that have gone on to do great things, guys that I remember for runnin’ the “B” courses out here. The first “B” course that we had in the F-15E had a guy who was what you might call a mild-mannered reporter, a very excellent aviator, not a loudmouth like most fighter pilots, very steady individual, first lieutenant, who left here and in the Gulf War was so good at his job, and so … well, they called him Killer, that was his nickname when he came out of there. He was so dynamic in combat, it’s like you’ve seen a lot of guys that happens to. He’s now a brigadier. He was a wing commander at Seymour Johnson when I went over to retire one of his classmates last year.
GILLEN: And who is this?
WYATT: His name is Kwast, K-W-A-S-T, Steve Kwast. He is now, if you look him up on the Air Force website, he is in command of some [Eric?] unit in Afghanistan—it’s either Afghanistan or—anyway, he’s over in the sandbox, for about probably the fifth time, because he went over there as a crew member and all that, and fought the first Gulf War. When I went over to retire one of his classmates, he was not there, he was TDY. I wanted to see him. That’s a long transition from a first lieutenant “B” course guy, that you followed all the way through to he’s a wing commander and a flag officer. Pretty amazing. But I have lots of stories like that of guys that I’ve known that have gone on and done great things.
I knew this guy who’s wing commander of the 56th Wing currently, when he was a captain, flying F-16s. That’s how long I’ve known him. And a whole bunch of other guys that are flag officers. Some of the guys at our leadership have retired. We lost one last year to an old Vietnam War wound that came back and got him, which had lain dormant for all these years, and then all of a sudden infection came.
GILLEN: Who was that?
WYATT: Dave Baker. Call name was Bull. He retired as a one-star. He was our dark gray, as we call it, ops group commander here, because we had two. Jim Klew [phonetic] was a light gray D.O., and Bull was a dark gray D.O. when we were standing that airplane up. He’s a very good friend of mine. Seymour did a flyover for him—it was at Arlington—it was amazing. The wing commander that replaced Kwast was up there representing the wing, and the flyover was just terrific, one of the best I’ve ever seen.
GILLEN: I think it’s a real good point, what you’re bringing out about the quality of people that come through here.
WYATT: Oh yeah.
GILLEN: I was even going to ask you, because I’ve been at Luke since December ’92, and I can tell you, I get a job offer at least every other year. People try to get me to go to San Antonio or Washington or Germany, and I do have family here, that’s part of the reason I stay here, but I love Luke. It’s an awesome place. It is a great place. And you’re kind of getting where you can maybe reflect on how you feel about Luke.
WYATT: Well, I��ll never leave here. Again, we’ve got family and kids here, but there’s no place…. I’ve often told my wife there’s only one other place that I would think about living, other than where we are right now, and that’s the hill country of Texas, north of San Antonio.
GILLEN: Real pretty.
WYATT: We have a terrific friend. She’s down there right now as a matter of fact, at his house visiting his wife whom they’ve known since grade school. He was a retired three-star, who was assistant vice chief of staff when he retired. Not bad work for a back-seater. But they live in Boerne about forty miles from Luckenbach. I love that country. I don’t know whether I could take the humidity. You know, when it gets a little bit humid out here in August, everybody calls how bad it is, and then I forget about other parts of the world. Luke, like I said, we’ve been here for twenty-two years now, and I consider it home. My two kids more or less grew up here. They were eleven and fifteen when we got here, but they both live here, and I don’t think they’ll ever leave either.
GILLEN: I think it’s kind of a pity that—the Phoenix area I think has a regard for Luke, definitely, but I think they are literally kind of not aware of what great things go on here, and the quality of people, the quality of work, how intense it is….
WYATT: I would assure you that nobody downtown does. Tom Browning did his best, and he helped a lot opening some eyes up in the downtown area. The west side people, they’re either big on it, or they’re our friends in El Mirage. But anyway, they realize what the impact is of this place being open every day out here. And I think they will continue to do so—especially with the complex that’s gonna grow down in Glendale towards here as a result of the football stadium and all that stuff over there. That’s going to be unrecognizable in the next few years, I think. So I would not leave here for any particular reason that I could think of. It’s just become part of the way of life, for us anyway. From all those years wearin’ a green bag and doin’ it, and flyin’ airplanes; and then all those years teaching simulators and stuff, I’ve watched all these people. Like you say, you think about the guys who commanded this base. You know, Marv Esmond [phonetic] retired three-star. Steve Plummer retired three-star. Howie Chandler’s now the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, four [unclear]. That’s not too shabby. How about Breedlove, who’s a three-star, who’s the chief operator of the Air Force. Hello?! So very few slugs have gone through this place, in the leadership position. We’ve been really fortunate in the last few years, the guys that are here.
GILLEN: Absolutely.
WYATT: And I don’t see any of that changing with the current leadership either. He’s gonna go and do good stuff. I think he’ll probably be gone this summer, but….
GILLEN: Yeah, it’s about that time for a change-out.
WYATT: Well, it’s a couple of years, you know.
GILLEN: Every two years.
WYATT: That would happen. And the future of Luke, if anybody has any sense and any position anywhere, the only place to put the F-35 schoolhouse is right here—regardless of what people around here think. I read the paper all the time about this recording they’ve got of an F-35 taking off at Egland. Well, they took it a hundred feet away from it! And the guys are gonna be at 1,500 feet and 85% power when they get climbin’ out of here, goin’ north, and it won’t…. Non-event. On the other hand, if the F-35 doesn’t come here, then I don’t know what’ll happen to Luke. No telling.
GILLEN: If you took a recording of an F-16 from a hundred feet, you’d be [unclear].
WYATT: Yeah. Apples are apples. So the only decision that I see anybody making wisely, is to put it here, primarily because the weather and that wonderful range complex that we don’t have to share so much; that we would, anywhere else in the world. Mountain Home has got a postage-stamp range. Winter weather? What?! You kiddin’ me?! Idaho?! Hello?! The Gulf Coast is saturated with test vehicles and the F-22 schoolhouse. So…. And there’s one Guard base somewhere that I saw in the paper recently, that had entered the fray. And I can’t imagine the Air Force giving the National Guard…. I forget where it was.
GILLEN: I can’t remember. Yeah, I saw that too.
WYATT: That schoolhouse job doesn’t need to go to the Guard unit. The Guard unit needs to stay right where they are, the experienced guys, combat experienced, ops guys, go down the road. There’s a big difference in runnin’ a schoolhouse and runnin’ an operational squadron. You have to make sure you can walk before you run with the “B” course guys. I used to tell my instructors, “You’ve got to remember a couple of things when you’re talking to people. If the guy is an experienced fighter guy in a transition course, and you tell him to do something on this mission, he’s going to do the exact opposite of what you tell him, because that’s the way they used to do it back where he came from. If you tell a ‘B’ course guy to do something, you better make damned sure that it’s exactly what you want him to do, because that’s exactly what he will do. And if you can remember that, you might get through this. And fortunately, most of 'em did, and we had a lot of good students and very talented individuals.
So my time at Luke was wonderful. Not many guys get to do what I got to do. We didn’t know when we got here that there’s a little check mark by our name down at MPC, says “these guys can’t move until Seymour Johnson stands up.” And I’m glad they didn’t tell us at the time, because we probably wouldn’t have done as good a job. But when we found out—you know, some of us had been here five or six years, goin’, “Something ought to be happening here.” “Oh, we didn’t tell ya’, you’re not done yet.” “Are you kiddin’?! Flyin’ an ‘E’ model out here in the desert? Put me in, coach! I can do that!” So there you have it.
GILLEN: That’s great.
WYATT: Hopefully that was what you’re lookin’ for.
GILLEN: Absolutely.
[END OF INTERVIEW]